Underscored_
underscored

@underscored

22 clips · 1 follower

Follow
Tag:natureClear
themarginalian.org
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

— Maria Popova
5d ago
theconvivialsociety
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?

The sight of the star-filled sky, a unifying human inheritance across thousands of years, has been all but lost to the majority of people who now live in urban and suburban settings. By one account 80% of Americans can no longer see the Milky Way. In 1994, when an earthquake knocked out power to much of Los Angeles in the middle of the night, some residents were so spooked by the appearance of the Milky Way above them that they called the police to report the strange phenomenon.

2w ago

The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a manthe other day picking up an arrowhead on the Assabet, and it suggested the same thoughts as if I had found it myself—that there is something very congenial between the sight of such an object and the human mind.

2w ago

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

3w ago

We have not the reverence for what is green and growing that we ought to have. A man's relation to Nature must be humble, as his relation to God. He must not think himself greater than the grass.

3w ago

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.

3w ago

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches.

1mo ago

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend it. And to defend it, you must love it.

1mo ago

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

1mo ago

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a convention of cartographers.

1mo ago

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. And within that home there are no sermons preached, no creeds recited; only the ancient, wordless liturgy of wind and stone.

1mo ago

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

3mo ago

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

4mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Stop Doing and Start Living

Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.

4mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

Start saving quotes →